Why your takeaway cup of coffee is destroying the environment

If you’re anything like most of the Stylist office, you’ll diligently chuck your paper cup in the recycling bin once you’ve finished your latte. But if you thought that meant you were doing your bit for the environment, we’ve got some bad news.

Takeaway coffee cups, it turns out, are not recyclable. And when you consider that the UK gets through 10,000 cardboard cups in just two minutes, our daily dose of caffeine starts to seem rather less appealing.

“Most consumers wrongly assume that paper cups are a ‘green’ choice,” says chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, writing for the BBC's Magazine. “It’s an assumption coffee companies are happy not to challenge… They’re not going to tell conscientious consumers that putting a used coffee cup in a recycling bin is pointless. But it is.”

The cups served up by most high street coffee chains are currently “almost impossible to recycle”, Fearnley-Whittingstall says. To make their cups waterproof, many major coffee shops use cardboard fused with polyethylene, a material that can’t be separated out again in a normal recycling plant.

You wouldn't be laughing if you knew where that cup was going...

While they could technically be recycled, it would require a highly specialised recycling facility – and there are only two of those in the UK. Legally, however, this means that companies are allowed to claim that their cups are “recyclable”.

To make the cups even more environmentally unfriendly, they are not made from recycled material in the first place.

“The millions of coffee cups we use every day are, in effect, virgin material with a single use, thrown almost immediately into the bin – a horrendous waste, with a hefty carbon footprint,” writes Fearnley-Whittingstall.

So what’s to be done?

If you care about the environment but the thought of going without your daily macchiato makes your blood run cold, don’t panic. Fearnley-Whittingstall recommends that we all “make a noise”, to let major companies know that we want them to reduce the amount of waste they generate.

In the meantime, you can still get your caffeine fix – but invest in a reusable cup instead. Here are some of the best…